The Great British winter has, throughout my lifetime, been an unbearable affair, not because of the cold, but because of the wind and ceaseless rain which is spewed upon the island. If winter entailed deep snow fall which turned Blighty into some Narnia-esque wonderland for a few months of the year, a place where children could build snow men and igloos, and where men could trek home after work with their coats pulled tight and truly feel the benefit of their fire when they got in, then I should not take such issue with the season.
As it happens it is a thoroughly depressing affair, one which serves the only good of making summer seem all the more wonderful, and ensuring that the pasty folk of this fair isle do not take those precious warmer months for granted. But life does not stop because of rain, it simply becomes more difficult and wet, as have the innumerable DIY jobs I’ve had to complete since moving house a few months back.
One such job I’ve had to keep putting off has been to extend a canopy from an old outhouse in my garden so that I might have somewhere sheltered to park my motorcycle. I work full time, five days a week, and during the Winter months my shifts see me leaving for work, and return home, in the dark. Combine these conditions with the other, more pressing, jobs I’ve had to do, and the canopy has had to wait longer than I’d have liked. Just when I’d begun to think I’d never find the time, a weekend suddenly freed up (the weekend I’m writing this, actually), and so I decided to seize the opportunity with both hands.
Ah, but this is England after all, and in the north during the month of January no less! One does not simply get to work outdoors in such an environment. The weather must be considered first. So, like all modern men are prone to do, I checked the weather forecast for direction. Sodden rain all day Saturday, mild and without rain Sunday it said. I planned my weekend accordingly.
With this direction from the weathermen I found my Saturday a more relaxed affair than I’ve been used to over the past few months. I took a brief lie in on the morning, cooked some bacon atop my log burner for breakfast, tidied a little and then edited a novella I’d written for much of the afternoon (except for having to take a delivery of firewood which had to be put away). The whole think was a pleasingly slow and quaintly middle class affair. ‘Oh, if my dole advisor could only see me now!’ I thought to myself, basking in the sort of comfy contentment which I’d wager only Hobbits and Englishmen of a century ago have ever experienced with any regularity.
But still, I could not shake that feeling of guilt which plagues any decent man with work to be doing during his moments of relaxation. It was a feeling I could have dismissed had the sky poured forth a torrent of rain beyond my window as the forecast had promised, but alas, the sky was clear with not even a speckle of midges piss to dampen the pavement. It was almost Autumnal in it’s climate. I considered getting out in the garden and starting the work but, shackled by the comfort of the fire, and sure that the moment I got to work the sky would cloud over and burst with precipitation, I refrained.
The rain never did come. The day passed by drier than we’d had in months and by it’s end any comforts which I’d enjoyed had been tainted by the waste. But there was always Sunday, and when she rolled around I didn’t hesitate in seizing the day, intent of getting some good work done and redeeming my lazy Saturday.
It wasn’t until I’d put up my work table, and set about cutting the timber to size, that I happened to look up. The sky was grey as a corpse, the cloud sufficiently thick so as to suffocate any charm out of the northern English country beneath it. ‘Looks like rain,’ I thought, and at that very moment, the heavens opened up and pissed all over my plans for home improvement, justifying as they did so my vital need of a place to keep my motorcycle during these winter months.
I retreated inside, cursing the weather forecast (which at this point had changed to predict rain, funnily enough). I wondered, too, why I hadn’t trusted my own judgment. How many times had I put off plans because of the say so of some faceless nerd at the met office who’d never even heard of my village? How many times had I ventured out on my motorbike without waterproofs because of those same men, only to return home sopping wet and with my manhood shrivelled to a sickening proportion? How many times had I ignored my own gut, eyes and sense, in favour of the opinions of those so called ‘experts’, who time and time again had proven themselves untrustworthy?
Well, never again! As Robert A. Heinlein put it, ‘specialization is for insects,’ and while insects have their place in this world, men don’t hold their opinions in high regard. It wasn’t so long ago that experts were raising all kinds of hell over Covid. Aided with videos of Chinese people collapsing in the streets (which were never explained to my knowledge), they turned our lives upside down. People were petrified and forcibly restricted. Old people were locked in nursing homes, we couldn’t hug family, children’s learning was severely retarded thanks to masks and school closures, the economy took an arse fucking, and people were hounded into taking some experimental injection which multiple big pharma companies managed to miraculously produce within a month of each other.
People lost their minds, not because the world was actually falling apart, not because of a really deadly pandemic, but because the experts told them they should. Oh, it was a wild time, don’t get me wrong, but every single hardship which I recall was down to those experts, not the virus they were warning about. Who knows the real extent of the damage they’ve caused. Only time will tell, I suppose.
Now the experts are beating the climate change drum again. They’re demonizing everything from gas stoves to log burners, forcing electric cars on us, and claiming that farming is heating up the planet so we’d best eat bugs to change the weather. In an age without God we’ve deified science and statistical analysis. The experts have become religious authorities with too much power, like Mayan priests cutting the hearts from 100,000 men to make it rain.
But they’re not so special. Specialization is for insects after all, and experts are just bugmen. Men pay them no heed. Men trust their own eyes, and their gut. They learn one thousand skills and demand more than a degree from a man if they are to respect him. They eat meat, burn dinosaur bones on long stretches of winding tarmac running through country hills, hug their grandmother, trust their instincts and make up their own minds. Most importantly, when they want to know if rain is due, they look at the clouds, not an app. Hang the weathermen. Who needs them?
C. O’Brien
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No weathermen were hurt during the writing of this piece, nor do I condone violence against them, nor any other employee of the met office.